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BABY

Annaleese Jochems

Cynthia is twenty-one, bored, and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. With stolen money and a dog in tow they run away and buy ‘Baby', an old boat docked in a beautiful bay, where Cynthia dreams they will live in a state of love. But strange events on an empty island turn their life together in a different direction.

Baby is a sunburnt psychological thriller of obsession and escape by one of the most exciting new voices in New Zealand fiction.

Annaleese Jochems was born in 1994 and grew up in Northland. She won the 2016 Adam Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the 2018 Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction for Baby, which is her first book.
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Published 2019-03-01 by Victoria University Press

Comments

"It's easy to see why this dark comic thriller has been compared to works by queen of the genre Patricia Highsmith."

Film rights sold to Wild Card Films

The writer explains how her novel Baby grew out of distaste for the criticism of EL James's novel – but became a story of ‘straight women's queerness' Read more...

Finalist in two categories at th 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards: the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize – the country's highest accolade for literature – and the Hubert Church Best First Book

"In her young female protagonist Annaleese Jochems has succeeded in creating a highly original voice that both intrigues and repels a memorable monster who could well have her own series of books if the author chooses to go down that road." Read more...

"A savvy, excruciatingly funny, nerve-shredding debut."

"Dripping with cynicism and green-eyed lust, this suspenseful debut from a Kiwi author is driven by the compulsively off-kilter worldview of its 21-year-old heroine Creepy and tense, with a blood-thirsty climax." Read more...

Sultry, sinister, hilarious, and demented. (Eleanor Catton, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Luminaries)

Patricia Highsmith meets reality TV in this compelling debut. Jochems nudges up the tension until we can't bear to look — and can't bear to look away: thrilling, dangerous and deliciously funny. (Catherine Chidgey, prize-winning author of The Wish Child and The Beat of the Pendulum)

"Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous, covetous emotional sinkhole of New Zealander Annaleese Jochems's assured debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coteries of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction." Read more...

Baby is a funny, taut, relentless fever-dream of a novel. Buy it and read it now, and you can brag about it one day the way people who bought and read Emily Perkins' Not Her Real Name in 1996 do today. (Louise Kasza, The Spinoff)

In Cynthia, she has crafted a memorable monster. Creepy and subversive, Baby is a classy debut.

An amazing, fresh voice in New Zealand fiction. (Jenna Todd)

"A dark satire of entitlement and the 'me' culture."